--> Highlighted new articles on Developer.com 1. Handling Life-Cycle Issues
with the MIDlet User Interface 2.
Working With Design Patterns:
Facade 3. Telling Time with
Ruby

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==========================================================Comments
from the
Editor==========================================================

It has been an interesting week in the developer community. There have been a
number of things mentioned that might seem subtle, but that could have big
impacts over the coming years.

Last week, Microsoft unveiled a new set of principles that it claimed would
help open its products farther and thus make them more interoperable. Bob
Muglia, Senior Vice-President of the Server and Tools Business, stated that the
changes Microsoft is making would be in four "interoperability principles." He
states that these are, "First, to provide an open connection to our high-volume
enterprise products; second, promote data portability; third, continue to
enhance our support for industry standards; and finally, to create more
opportunities to strengthen dialogue and engagement with customers and the
industry, including open source communities."

Will these principles change the way Microsoft shares information? Time will
tell. If it does, then as stated, there could be a notable impact in the future.
Muglia indicated that they would be publishing 30,000 pages of client and server
protocols on the MSDN site that had previously been available under the
Microsoft trade secret license. This will be followed by protocol documentation
for Office 2007. This seems like a good start!

Another bit of news that was released today was the announcement that Sun
Microsystems had finalized the acquisition of the MySQL database. While MySQL is
not a huge player in the database market when compared to SQL Server and Oracle,
it is a well known player. It has had 50 percent of the open source data market.
With the acquisition by Sun (for a billion dollars), it could get a boost
farther into the corporate world.

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun CEO and President, stated earlier today that this
acquisition was "the most important acquisition in Sun's history as well as the
most important acquisition in the modern software industry." While I agree it
was a major acquisition, time will tell if it is as big as he stated. It does
put MySQL in a position to continue to grow in the corporate world, so it will
be interesting to watch of the coming years.

These are just two of the events happening over the last couple of days. It
will take years to see what the level of impact they have will actually be.

=========================================================Recently
Published Books=========================================================

For those of you keeping up by reading books. The following are just a few of
the new books that have been recently released. If you've read any of these,
feel free to write a review to be posted on CodeGuru. See the submission
guidelines at:

1. Handling Life-Cycle Issues with the MIDlet User
Interface By Richard G. Baldwin - Learn to
program MIDlet user interfaces that minimize the MIDlet's memory footprint while
the MIDlet is paused making consistent use of the MIDlet class methods to
satisfy the life cycle rules of MIDlets.http://nl.internet.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=1,3t8m,1,gyze,5bmn,aqxl,3qs9